Novel career goals

Many writers, including F Scott Fitzgerald, TS Eliot and Kingsley Amis, have needed substantial help to complete their best-known work. Before Fitzgerald's editor intervened, The Great Gatsby was to be named Gold-Hatted Gatsby. How different literary history could have been.

Today's aspiring writers, flocking to creative writing courses at postgraduate and undergraduate levels, seem to feel this need for an experienced eye especially keenly. Two years ago, writing in the Guardian about the decline of the fiction editor in publishing, Blake Morrison observed that the "massive growth in creative writing programmes in Britain" could partly be explained by writers seeking "the kind of editorial help they no longer hope to get from publishing houses". And friends with the literary judgment of Ezra Pound or Philip Larkin (who helped Eliot and Amis respectively) are hard to come by.

But are students taking these courses in such numbers just to become painstaking editors? Graham Hodge, a second-year student on the part-time MA at Birkbeck, says: "There is the notion - fuelled by rock-star writers like Zadie Smith and tales of six-figure advances - that being a writer of literary fiction is a pretty tasty career. So I think some people see a creative writing MA as being a bit like ... an MBA - your passport to a nice pad in Notting Hill." But, he continues, "A term into my second year as a part-time MAer, I can confirm these perceptions are false ... planning to earn enough from writing to give up the day job will almost certainly lead to disappointment."

Novelist Jeremy Sheldon, who teaches at Imperial College and Birkbeck, says: "None of my students are glory-hunters. They are generous in workshops and all seem committed to the process of writing, not just the outcome." But the whiff of celebrity changes things. When he tutored the Richard and Judy writing course, he found that "some of them hadn't read much. It did feel more like The X Factor". He suspects that a "middle-class search for celebrity" fuels a few students, but most are looking for "a benign mentor figure with more writing experience". Martin Amis, commenting on his students at Manchester, agreed: "They seemed to be very serious about their undertaking."

Celebrity appeal

Even the allure of literary celebrity is nothing new. Since Byron woke to find himself famous after the publication of the first cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, literary careers have appealed to those ravenous for renown. More cynical observers suggest that the prospect of fame is exploited by tutors and institutions with other agendas. A senior professor of English literature describes creative writing courses as "a job creation scheme for Coca-Cola League novelists", conceding that the appointment of Martin Amis at Manchester has extended the scheme to "the Premier League".

A reader creation scheme, too? Students on an undergraduate creative writing module at Exeter are instructed to "read their tutors' [Andy Brown and Philip Hensher] books". In his defence, Hensher, novelist and professor at Exeter, says: "I was specifically asked to put a book of mine on the module reading lists ... in practice, students always ask about the process of writing, how you came to do what and why. If you've published a number of books ... they might as well all be talking about the same book."

Institutions do well, too, considering courses can be relatively cheap to run. Little, apart from a tutor and a meeting room, is required. Students even write some of their own study materials. Fees, meanwhile, are increasing, to typically twice the level of other literature courses.

Most arts MAs cost about £3,200 for one year's full-time study. Some creative writing MAs are still charged at this level. But the MSt (Master of Studies) in creative writing at Oxford is more than twice as much: £3,392 per year, part-time, over two years. Birkbeck's MA is £3,420 per year part-time, or £6,432 full-time. An interesting example is the new Centre for New Writing at Manchester, where the creative writing MA costs £3,240 for full-time study in 2007-08. With its star tutor Martin Amis, one wonders how long the fees will remain so low. Ian McGuire, co-director of the centre, admits that they intend to "raise the fees slightly ... but nowhere near twice the fees for the MA in English". This is because "we are offering MA students quite a bit more than we offered before," with extensive readings, workshops and masterclasses. Clare Morgan, director of the MSt at Oxford, argues that "UK prices generally compare favourably with prices in the US. The non-standard elements of a complex creative writing course do need to be supported by an appropriate fee level."

Nor are institutions just after money. Novels by faculty members count as publications towards a department's research assessment exercise. Hensher says there may be "some awareness in departments that employing a busy novelist, publishing a book every two years or so, is not going to do their RAE scores any harm". Hensher published six novels between 1994 and 2004. Few academic researchers could match that level of productivity.

Most course directors and departmental heads declined to comment, although, as Russell Celyn Jones, director of the MA at Birkbeck, says, the right tutor for an MA course will almost by definition be fairly prolific: "I never, ever consider what a tutor's contribution would be to the RAE when I employ one. But I am very conscious of what they write and how many books they've produced, because students want to be taught by writers with proven creative integrity in an aggressive market."

Most observers agree that the rise of creative writing (CW) is due, to some extent, to a crisis in English studies. For Celyn Jones, the arrival of novelists to teach literature is long overdue: "It's often the closed-minded, dried-up academic who objects to the advent of CW within the academy. But that smoke in the air he can smell is his own flesh burning in the funeral pyre. The fact is, CW is the more engaging way to impart to students what literature is: a living subject. Writers know what it is like to live inside the novel; academics know what it's like to live outside it. Both views are complementary in my view, but not everyone seems to agree."

Sectarianism in English studies

John Sutherland, retired Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English at University College London, is scathing about the prospect that "coopting a tame writer, like a panda in a Chinese zoo", will rescue English studies. He contrasts the "sectarianism" in English studies with the acceptance of inter-disciplinary connection in the sciences. "The issue seems to me proof of what has gone wrong with English studies, and the dead end it's got itself into. I teach at a science institution, Caltech. The idea there that theoretical physics and applied physics, or maths and economics, have no organic connection would seem crazy. But what, if any, is the relationship between the 'theory' generated in English departments and, say, the shortlist of the Man Booker prize, or the TS Eliot prize? 'Only connect', EM Forster said."

Many novelists, however, are confident that creative writing tuition offers new insights into literature. Hensher believes that "creative writing feeds back into the critical awareness of literature. In our classes, we do seem to raise questions ... which traditional criticism has been little concerned with. I've never heard an academic class discuss the grammatical divisions of Bleak House, for instance, to raise only the most blatant example. We might have more to offer them than they us."

Julia Bell, novelist and tutor on the MA and BA at Birkbeck, points out: "Creative writing is now an established pathway in English studies, and at Birkbeck we teach it at BA level as a means of investigating text. We place a firm emphasis on reading as a means to studying writing." She suggests that the new competitive climate in higher education "in which students are paying higher fees and want skills as well as knowledge from their degree courses" is also responsible. A student leaving the Birkbeck BA course, Bell argues, "should have the critical and rhetorical skills to get a job in the creative industries, in education, editing, copywriting and so on".

Gritty professionalism is a dominant feature of the creative writing scene today. As Morgan observes, "the romantic notion of the single artist struggling ... in a garret has been eroded", replaced by "the increasing acceptability of the notion of writing as a craft, the skills of which one can develop through apprenticeship". Amis agrees: "As Auden said, poets dash forward. A novelist is a grinder. You can't write 500 pages in a fit of inspiration. You can teach craft, not inspiration."

Far from being the universities' dupes, students realise that success in writing, if it comes at all, will only come after much hard work and experience. They are prepared to pay higher fees, but only for a more personalised and professional service, which often includes extensive meetings with agents and publishers.

For many busy writers, an MA course is partly a means of time management. Jon Elsom, a student on the Birkbeck MA, is creative director of advertising agency DLKW. I have a very demanding, often stressful job which, if I'm not careful, divests me of all spare time and energy," he says. "Committing the time and ... money to study an MA gives me the structure, motivation and discipline I need to be able to tell my job to get back in its box when I need to."